Lsn #6: Driving Traffic to Your Blog

This is the hardest part of the process, not because it cannot be done, but because it takes T I M E. And we as humans are impatient creatures. The best you can do is apply these lessons, get everything in place, start posting more and more blogs, and suddenly one day your blog impressions will start growing. It's an aging process like fine wine and cheese.

First, let's review some terminology:

Impressions: the number of times your page is opened or 'crawled' by a search engine. No clicks are necessary to get an 'impression'.

Money Site: The ultimate goal is to have people visiting your money site. This is the site where all your products are for sale, where your affiliate marketing links are located, and where you have the best Pay Per Click (PPC) links.

SEO "Search Engine Optimization": A strategy used by you - the blogger or site owner - in order to manipulate your blog or money site to the front of the line.

SEO Strategies:

Reverse Search Tool: A free tool to help you pick keywords instead of guessing.

Target Marketing (aka 'Organic searches'): Getting traffic via keyword searches rather then Direct Marketing which is getting traffic via direct links to your site. Google rewards Target Marketing higher PPC (Pay Per click) dollars.

Backlinks or Linkbacks: (The same thing depending on who is saying the word.) It is getting your link(s) on someone else's site in order to get their traffic to come back to you. Backlinks are given alot of notice by Google who thinks if a bunch of sites are posting your link, then you must be important.

Email Marketing (aka 'Permission Marketing'): Using an email campaign to deliver free information to subscribers. And that information contains backlinks and affiliate marketing links.

Affiliate Marketing: Not necessarily SEO, but definitely a way to earn dollars online at no cost to you.

Vertical Portals: a comparison website used to research pricing on your product niche. A Horizonal Portal is a wide range of goods, i.e. "Health Care"; a Vertical Portal is a narrow range, i.e. "Hospital Beds".

E-Publishing: Posting articles that other sites can syndicate (use on their own web publication at no cost.) E-Publishing provides thousands of viewers, and so the strategy here is Backlinks to your money site.

Page Rank (PR): This strategy is recently losing its clout in the SEO world. Basically, Google assigns a numerical weight (0-10, 10 being the best) to a site. But Google won't release how they compute the ranking system. It is increasingly unreliable to use within an SEO strategy if the judging process is kept secret. Also, in Oct 2009, Google had removed Page Rank from its Webmaster Tools. I only mention it here as a warning that some online sites will try to sell you a "secret formula" to get a high page rank. In reality, it was once worth chasing, but is no longer relevant.

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And on that note, "once worth chasing, but no longer relevant", so goes the internet age of new strategies and ideas. It is a changing formula because it is still in toddler mode. The internet was born in the 1960's, and corporate websites became prominent in the early to mid 1990's. But only in the last decade did you - the home user - decide to begin posting to the world.

Now, even as I type this, there are whispers and chatter of websites becoming irrelevant. I can't fathom it today (2010), but I also can't see why not. It is an evolving technology. Twitter was only born in 2004. Now it's the way Iran and Haiti are communicating with the world when all internet lines are down. It only makes sense that we will abandon hard lines and go through all telecommunications.

When you finish this Blogging for Coins course, you will know as much as I do. But don't bet that these lessons will apply forever. They certainly will not. Keep learning and researching. When you hear of something new, apply it immediately so that you beat the hundreds of thousands that haven't heard of it yet. (And please remember me and share your new found knowlege!)

Following this terminology lesson will be posts describing the above strategies, including links and examples. You may feel overwhelmed and perplexed at this point, (I sure did when I first ran across all these terms). But soon you will learn when and how to apply them to your particular blog or site.

SEO Strategy 1: Tell People!